Some processes executed in a computer system have a limited time frame for the execution. In the case of batch processing, for example, a period following the end of online services of the previous day up to prior to the start of online services of the following day (referred to as the ‘deadline’) may be designated as the time frame allowed to execute the batch processing. The batch processing is achieved, for example, by executing a plurality of jobs in a predetermined order. Therefore, in the computer system, the start of the execution of each job is scheduled in such a manner that all jobs included in the batch processing are executed within the designated time frame.
Note, however, that it is sometimes the case that a job may not be performed according to the scheduled execution time. In this regard, at many operation sites, an operator monitors delays in the batch processing.
Delays are monitored according to the following procedure, for example:
(1) An administrator of a system derives a critical path based on past execution history data (operation results) and monitors the execution status of jobs on the critical path. The critical path is information related to, among job groups each containing one or more jobs with dependency constraints (job nets), a job group having the sequence of jobs which add up to the longest overall duration, and indicates the execution order of the jobs of the longest path. If the execution of a job on the critical path is late, the process completion time of the entire job nets is delayed. In view of this, the administrator selects jobs on the critical path as monitoring targets. For example, jobs with a long execution time and jobs whose execution time is likely to change significantly are selected as the monitoring targets.
(2) The administrator defines the monitoring target jobs in the system, together with their scheduled end times serving as criteria for delay determination.
(3) The system activates an alarm if the execution of each monitoring target job is not finished when the scheduled end time has arrived.
Note that a technology has been proposed which completes a batch job by a predetermined time even when the amount of data handled in batch processing has changed or when a failure has occurred in a batch processing system.
Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2012-128770
However, detecting a delay in a monitoring target job at the scheduled end time may be too late, thus making it difficult to deal with the delay. For example, if the occurrence of the job delay is predicted at an early stage, the batch processing may be still made to finish at the scheduled time by reserving the execution of less important jobs for the following day. On the other hand, when the job delay is detected just before the start of online services, unprocessed jobs may contain no jobs to be reserved for the following day. In such a case, the batch processing is not completed within the time frame allowed for the execution.